Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday September 19, 2007 @08:59AM
from the can-i-hearth-back-to-everquest-yet dept.

Tao Takashi writes "Linden Lab, developers of the popular 3D platform "Second Life" started to think about an open standard for interconnecting virtual worlds. The motivation behind this is to make Second Life more scalable but also to allow connection of other grids not hosted by Linden Lab. The process of defining components and protocols is supposed to be handled completely in the open with community participation. When finished the protocol documentation is supposed to be submitted to standard committees such as IETC, W3C etc.
The discussion has already started on the Second Life wiki and you can also find a first architecture proposal by Linden Lab."

I worked for http://worlds.com/ [worlds.com] back in the mid 1990s (remember the billboards in
S.F. and other major cities? What a freekin' JOKE), and we had the basic
technology to do this back then. The system included a world builder as
part of the product, although it needed at least another year of work to
become a real product. The backend also allowed for this, you could link
to other servers on different machines. Users of Worlds have been hacking
on it to create their own worlds for years (the server really only tracks
your location -- the textures and such are served up from HTTP servers, so
once you get the server to a location that YOU have created, you can just
distribute your world to your friends and serve up the textures). The problem
was that the management at the time blew their entire wad on marketing (see
above) and other follies, rather in focusing on anything that might be
of USE! It was truely frustrating.

I am impressed by the tenacity of the current president -- Worlds.com has gone
broke twice and is STILL hanging on and appears to be planning something
for this fall (what it is, I have no idea -- I haven't worked there for
over six years).

They have "PPremium servers". In normal conditions 4 sims run on a 4 core machine. With premium servers they run only one sim on such machine. There are also slow, discount servers which run 8-16 sims on a 4 core machine. This crashing is just from bugs which are just everywhere in SL.